To enhance competitiveness of a future network, The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) launches a completely new evolved network, which is named a System Architecture Evolution (SAE) system.
An architecture of the SAE system spans multiple different fields and devices; therefore, a service in the SAE system also spans different devices in different fields. However, network operation and maintenance for the SAE system still stay at a basic level based on maintenance of a single network element, and operation and maintenance for a single device are provided by an element management system (EMS). This operation and maintenance manner based on a single network element already cannot meet needs of operation and maintenance. To improve a network operation and maintenance level, visual operation and maintenance based on end to end (E2E) will become potential needs.
A 3GPP standard defines a feature of network-wide trace, namely, E2E trace, which provides trace for a signaling procedure. The E2E trace may be used in operation and maintenance diagnosis in aspects of service access and service maintenance, thereby implementing E2E visual operation and maintenance for a signaling procedure. However, for a problem in terms of experience of user service completeness, for example, a problem that a packet loss results in voice call interruption or even silence, a technical means, such as capturing a traced user packet inside a network element, or capturing a packet by using an interface probe outside a network element and performing analysis, needs to be used to check and diagnose the network element and the interface one by one. A manner of excluding a network element or an interface one by one is time-consuming and troublesome, and requires a relatively long time for locating, thereby resulting in relatively low operation and maintenance efficiency.